EDITORIAL: New Route 66 Visitor Center Commission needs to be realistic and transparent

As the old saying goes, you get what you pay for.

And in the case of Route 66 Visitor Center, the city of Albuquerque got exactly what it paid for, and the running deficits that come with it.

The city took ownership of the $13.2 visitor center earlier this year, even though the boondoggle is outside city limits, when the county donated the 21,667-square-foot project to the city.

Proponents, including visitor center champions Bernalillo County Commissioner Steven Michael Quezada and Albuquerque City Councilor Klarissa Peña, initially touted the visitor center as a self-sustaining venture, saying its taproom, banquet hall, museum and outdoor amphitheater would cover its operating costs by generating revenue through private event rentals and an on-site brewery tenant.

Few believed it then.

Bernalillo County Commissioner Eric Olivas called the visitor center’s business plan “dubious” given that it relied on alcohol sales at a location just outside Albuquerque’s western boundary on Nine Mile Hill.

Back in 2019, Bernalillo County approved the multimillion-dollar center at 12300 Central SW without an economic feasibility study. In 2020, an after-the-fact study by Economic & Planning Systems Inc. determined it could take at least three years for the center to be self-sustaining.

Even then, the study warned the facility would likely operate at a deficit unless it booked 120 events each year with average attendance of at least 100 people.

Eventually the city and the county conceded the visitor center would not be self-sustaining as advertised and would instead require subsidies.

Recognizing that reality, the Bernalillo County Commission voted unanimously in February to drop the property from the county portfolio and declined to continue funding for it in April. The county terminated its contract with West Central Community Development Group, which had been chosen to run the facility, when the nonprofit group fell behind on required reporting, including an audit report that wasn’t turned in nor an annual plan.

The WCCDG, of which Peña was the executive director in its early years and her husband was a board president, had been contracted to run the facility for $500,000 annually until the county finally pulled the plug on their contract.

Later, an outside vendor that had been chosen to manage the brewery and banquet room walked away from the project, which proponents hoped would ultimately include a neon sign graveyard, lowrider museum, and gift shop.

Why did the county want to unload the visitor center after pushing the project for years? The stated reason for the transfer was challenges with the liquor license and that the city had experience managing alcohol sales that the county didn’t.

Few bought that, either, despite all the hoopla, which included a large community party and ribbon-cutting ceremony county officials held at the visitor center in September 2022 that featured over an hour of speeches, music and a car show.

The facility was set to open sometime in September 2023, but remained closed due to delayed parts, a long wait for the center’s walk-in refrigerator and freezer, and issues with the kitchen’s electricity.

The building was completed in 2023 and the visitors center is now open to the public Wednesday-Friday, though work is not complete. Since June 2023, several key features, including the taproom, have remained closed.

Now, the plans are for the city to fully open the “new gem of Albuquerque” and “vibrant cultural hub” by 2026.

The 2020 market report cautioned that while the location near Atrisco Vista would be good at snagging visitors driving into Albuquerque, the “remote location” may make it a struggle to compete with other facilities for local weddings and banquets — and make it difficult to find a taproom tenant as “everyday customers have other bars and restaurants at more convenient locations to their home or place of work.”

Still, city leaders seem determined to open a taproom on the outskirts of town. The Albuquerque City Council on Monday approved creating a Route 66 Visitor Center Commission by a 7-1 vote.

The commission will recommend policies and goals for the visitor center, establish programming, recommend a fee schedule for rentals, and act as a forum about Route 66.

Commission members will include city officials and representatives from the West Central Community Development Group, and will also recommend contractual arrangements between the city and visitor center contractors.

The commission will include seven voting members and three non-voting advisory members. All 10 will be confirmed by the City Council. The initial members will serve five-year terms, and subsequent members will have three-year terms.

Details of the new bureaucracy get even deeper than that. Three city officials will have voting power on the commission: the mayor or someone to represent the mayor; and two city councilors, one of whom has to represent the section of Albuquerque south of Central, west of the river and east of the city limits.

The West Central Community Development Group will designate four representatives with voting power on the commission. The director of the city’s Arts and Culture Department will serve as an advisory member. The nonprofit Visit Albuquerque, which is contracted for convention and tourism promotion by the city, will have an advisory member, as will the Hispano Chamber of Commerce.

In other words, the city is all-in.

Quezada told the Editorial Board in 2020 that Disney was interested in the visitor center and that “we already have people waiting in line.”

Four years later, the only visible line is the bottom line.

Dropping the $13.2 million boondoggle jointly funded by the city, county and state doesn’t seem likely given that the City Council created the Visitor Center Commission on Monday. Like the Palindrome Village Center “monstrosity” in Los Ranchos, the building has been built and we’ve got to make the best of it.

But now that the city owns it, city officials must do a much better job than the county giving taxpayers a regular, transparent accounting of how well, or not, the visitor center is doing.

Pie-in-the-sky predictions won’t cut it anymore. Route 66 nostalgia doesn’t pay the utility bills. The city got what it paid for, and it’s going to be up to the new Visitor Center Commission to try and make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.